well there is quite many pd-related sites already, i thought
why pdpedia is needed ?
As a primo-supporter of the idea in France, let me try to explain. There are main reasons:
1/ there is no dictionnary or lexicon about the 3000 objects/externals/abstraction usable in PD. Most of the ressources about those components are spread over a hundred sites, and help patches are not made to explain all about one component.
2/ the actual documentation is static. Once made, (most of the time) by the developper and published somewhere on the web, there are few possibilities for the community to correct, complete, translate or improve the quality of this documentation.
3/ the actual documentation is mainly in English ==> impossible to persuade some schools to use open source software in many countries without localised documentation ( I have seen this case many times in France).
4/ most of the coders are not good documenters. Sometimes they don't document ( exept the help patch), because they don't like this work, or because they don't know how to do it clean. The pedagogic aspect of a documentation is important for newbies. As in Wikipedia, everyone should have the possibility to improve one of the 3000 components in a few clicks, and publish it instantaneously to all the community.
5/ there is no tool to know which object/external/abstraction is available for the use people need for their patch. Learning the 3000 components needs a life or autistic capacities. Pdpedia will have both a category portal and a search engine.
The pdpedia project is to build a living/open/collective/multilingual encyclopedy about each of the actual 3000 possible components in a PD patch. Each page of PDpedia can welcome many rubriques as those we have published here for test last year http://pdpedia.dreamhosters.com/index.php?title=Menu (not completed, and for test only)
Many advantages output from a wikipedia-like process:
-The users can be contributors of the documentation. -The users can be translators of the documentation. -The pdpedia file can be (automatically) embbeded in each new pd release or nightly build giving the possibility to have a complete doc offline. -The pdpedia database can be easily edited in paper or booklets with wikimedia tools. -The pdpedia database server engine could in the future "understand" text patches and translate them into images. -Reversely, a click on a patch image in your browser could open the patch in PD ?
and many other possibilities. But for my opinion, the main advantage is that the users collaborate to make the best clear and useful documentation, like in wikipedia.
JN
PS. just in case, the pdpedia.org DNS has been bought for one year by our non-profit org last october, and we offer it to PD community if needed. Otherwise, the name will be automatically deleted in one month.